Stay Alive

In wartime Berlin it was possible to find every form of human behaviour, from conformity and cruelty to bravery and indifference. Using his father’s memories and letters as well as a wide range of other sources, Ian Buruma has composed a brilliant account of what it felt like to be there. Stay Alive is a beautifully written account of a city under military and moral siege. – Professor Anne Applebaum * author of Autocracy Inc. *Beautifully written and deeply researched, Stay Alive is particularly haunting in showing how ordinary Germans conformed with Nazism and the persecution and deportation of their Jewish neighbours. It makes a chilling warning of how people can acquiesce and look away from the worst realities. – Gary Bass * author of Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia *An exceptional excursion into the multiple, contradictory lives, voices and dilemmas of Berlin’s inhabitants during the Nazi war years… By providing a compelling and compulsive immersion into that crucial period of history, Buruma also eloquently reminds us of how, in our own time, the temptation to look away from persecution and injustice has terrifying consequences. – Ariel Dorfman * author of Death and the Maiden *Ian Buruma brings to life Berlin during World War II so vividly that you can imagine yourself blithely strolling the streets of the city or hunkering down in the bomb shelters. Buruma tapped a wealth of sources – not only published memoirs, but first-hand interviews with elderly survivors and a cache of letters stored in a tin written by Buruma’s own father, a forced labourer in Berlin during the war. The beauty of the book is Buruma’s nuanced writing about the Germans who weighed resistance against the imperative to stay alive, and those who simply became cogs in Hitler’s murderous regime. – Barbara Demick, Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of Nothing to EnvyBuruma draws on an abundant source of material, including letters and diaries, enriching these with interviews with wartime eyewitnesses. * Kirkus (starred review) *

Ian Buruma was born in the Netherlands. He studied Chinese at Leiden University and cinema at Nihon University, Tokyo. He has lived and worked in Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, and New York. He is a regular contributor to Harper’s and the New Yorker and writes monthly columns for Project Syndicate. He is a professor at Bard College and lives in New York City.